What if Christians ...

Friday

Feb 17, 2006 at 12:01 AM

Staci Leonard Charlotte

Editor: If I judged Christianity by letters to the editor in The Dispatch written in the name of religion/God, I would want to run as far as I possibly could from anything that ever had to do with Christianity. If I judged Jesus by the letters I read here, I would have a poor picture of who he is.

What if Christians stopped trying to be right all the time? What if we stopped trying to show everyone else how "wrong" they are and how "right" we are? What if, instead having a war mentality toward people who are homosexuals or prostitutes or addicts or "different" from you in any number of ways, we loved them? "The battle we are in is a battle against principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In a war, you shoot the enemy, not the hostage" (Donald Miller).

What if we lived a life of love - of caring for the poor, of being a servant, of knowing and loving people who are different from you - be it different by race, culture, social class, religion, whatever? What if we cared for people so much that our lives demanded an explanation, and that explanation was Christ in us? What if instead of living like our mission is to beat people over the head with our Bibles, we lived life out of an overflow of a deep love for Christ?

What if our chief concern was knowing Jesus intimately? What if we stopped trying to force Christianity on everyone? What if our desire was that people know how much Jesus cares for them, no matter who they are or what they've done? What if we, who profess the authority of the Bible, actually believed what it says about love? What if we showed people the same grace that Jesus has shown us a thousand times over?

What if we stopped being like the Pharisees - who memorized so much scripture and held the truth in such high esteem that they didn't care who they destroyed in order to protect it, all the while missing the point of Jesus, even as he was standing right beside them?